Cliven Bundy's Misguided Insurrection Revives An Old Debate About Land In The West

Protesters place a sign on
a bridge near the Bureau of Land Management 's base camp where
seized cattle, that belonged to rancher Cliven Bundy, are being
held at near Bunkerville, Nevada April 12,
2014.Jim
Urquhart/Reuters

Children frolicked in a river, the aroma of barbecue wafted
through the air and a has-been rocker creaked his way through a
set on a jerry-built stage.

Cliven Bundy’s
"Patriot Party", held on April 18th at a cattle ranch 70 miles
north-east of Las Vegas, was like any other rural mini-festival,
if you ignored the armed men in military fatigues sternly
patrolling the grounds.

A week earlier over a thousand such freedom-lovers had answered
the call of Mr Bundy, a cattle-rancher with a fondness for online
rabble-rousing, to stare down armed officials from the Bureau of
Land Management (BLM).

The agents were seeking to enforce a court ruling that Mr Bundy
should remove, on environmental grounds, his 900-odd cattle from
the federal land on which they grazed.

Supporters drove hundreds of miles in pickup trucks bearing
patriotic stickers, bringing with them an awesome armoury. After
a brief but tense stand-off, during which the protesters trained
assault rifles on their adversaries, the officials released the
400-odd cattle they had rounded up and beat a retreat, leaving
behind a jubilant mob and a rancher secure in his defiance.

Mr Bundy has been defying the BLM for over 20 years, racking up
unpaid fees worth over $1m.

His family, he says, has been ranching on the land for longer
than the BLM has existed; he also denies the existence of the
United States, reserving his allegiance for the state of Nevada.

The Economist

This argument
is no stronger on second glance than first, but it found a broad
audience, extending to legislators from nearby states who joined
the revellers at the ranch; to Dean Heller, Nevada’s Republican
senator, who defended Mr Bundy’s backers after his
hyperventilating Democratic counterpart, Harry Reid, labelled
them "domestic terrorists"; and to some conservative commentators
who discerned a patriotic hero where others saw merely a
law-breaking crank.

Far-right anti-government groups have been "itching for a fight"
for a while, says Ryan Lenz of the Southern Law Poverty Centre,
which monitors such outfits.

The Bundy case provided the casus belli. Mr Lenz witnessed the
stand-off; one mistake by either side, he says, could have led to
bloodshed. Mr Reid has sworn that the law will yet be enforced,
but with armed men still patrolling Mr Bundy’s ranch it is not
clear how. Some worry that other grudge-bearing ranchers may copy
his example.

A supporter of rancher
Cliven Bundy carries a copy of the U.S. Constitution in his shirt
pocket during a Bundy family "Patriot Party" near Bunkerville,
Nevada.Steve
Marcus/Reuters

Irate westerners have long railed against the federal
government’s vast land holdings, the result of America’s
19th-century westward expansion.

Yet their anger has mainly sputtered. The Sagebrush Rebellion,
sparked by a 1976 law that established rules for the BLM’s
management of federal land, found a fan in Ronald Reagan, but his
pledge to sell off swathes of lands fizzled in the 1980s.

More recently several states, led by Utah, have passed laws or
resolutions urging the transfer of federal land. Mr Bundy’s
antics have energised these efforts at the grass roots, but the
congressional majorities needed to secure such transactions look
as elusive as ever.

There are two reasons for this. The first is the growing clout of
environmentalists, who tend to think selling federal land would
lead to orgies of overdevelopment.

Ironically, given recent events, conservationist groups have
often quarrelled with what some call the Bureau of Livestock and
Mining for supposedly being captured by the industries it is
meant to regulate.

Bruce Huber, a law professor at Notre Dame Law School, notes that
it is exceedingly rare for the BLM to withdraw rights to federal
land once they have been granted. In this respect Mr Bundy’s case
is unusual, although he typifies the sense of entitlement some
ranchers have developed.

Cliven
Bundy.REUTERS/Jim
Urquhart

The second reason is that the Feds’ opponents are divided among
themselves.

Economists who fret about inefficient federal management may have
little in common with ranchers who pay, by one estimate, less
than one-ninth of the market rate for their grazing rights on
federal land, or with states’-rights advocates who instinctively
distrust anything bearing federal fingerprints.

Such divisions, still strong, have doomed previous insurrections.

Yet there are good arguments to offload federal possessions. The
BLM is an opaquely run nightmare; cattle-industry insiders howl
at its bureaucratic excesses. Subsidies, which run into the
hundreds of millions annually, not only diddle the taxpayer, they
encourage overgrazing.

Vast energy reserves sit beneath federal lands, not all worth
preserving; recently the Congressional Research Service found
that oil and gas production on federal land had fallen since
2009, while soaring on private property.

It should not be left to Mr Bundy and his gun-toting followers to
make this case.